The weekly Daley: ‘Everything’s coming up ruses’

With warm weather comes the growing season, and things are sprouting up everywhere. Green weeds along with green grass-like substances abound, and Iris plants are shooting up with their purple and root beer-hued crowns, while buds are turning to blossoms almost before our eyes. Pine pollen seems to have subsided, but something every bit as odious has taken its place in my neighborhood — some kind of sap, from oak trees I think. I don’t know how tree sap can turn into a black sand-like grit, but that’s what seems to be happening on my back porch.

Subscription Required

Thank you for reading the MtDemocrat.com digital edition. In order to continue reading this story please choose one of the following options.

Current Subscribers
If you are a current subscriber and wish to obtain access to MtDemocrat.com, please select the
Subscriber Verification option below. If you already have a login, please select "Login" at the
lower right corner of this box.

Special Introductory Offer
For a short time we will be offering a discount to those who call us in order to obtain access to
MtDemocrat.com and start your print subscription. Our customer support team will be standing by
Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm to assist you.

Call and Save! (530) 344-5000

If you are not a current subscriber and wish not to take advantage of our special introductory
offer, please select the $12 monthly option below to obtain access to MtDemocrat.com and start
your online subscription

Political signs are popping up where just the other day there was only an empty corner or intersection or front yard. That’s how I really know it’s “election season.” Every sign I’ve seen so far is for a local race, judge, Auditor-Controller, district supervisor and the like. I haven’t yet seen any for regional or state or federal positions, but no doubt they’ll be along soon. The 2014 mid-term congressional races will be decided by November’s election, and between now and then, if history is any indication, the candidates will become stupider and stupider as voting day draws nigh.

I take as the yardstick, the 2012 presidential and other races, and from bits and snatches I’ve heard or read. If history is any indication, Republicans battling each other for primary votes will swear on a stack of bibles that the earth is just as old and not a minute older than what each bible in the stack says it is, about 6,000 years, give or take. Not one of them will admit to ever having taken a science course in school, not at Stanford, not Yale or Harvard, let alone MIT or CIT, Sac State or Cal. None will acknowledge the fossil record, because that would give away the fact that they might have picked up a science book or at least a National Geographic during their tenure on this adolescent globe. Their science will begin with, “In the beginning…” and end with whatever it ends with, doesn’t really matter because it’s all about when it began, 6,000 years or so ago.

(True story: My brother-in-law was debating the approximate age of the earth with a co-worker and suggested that dinosaur bones indicate that it’s a lot older than the biblical account. The co-worker said he’d have to go home after work and study the matter. Next day he came to work and allowed as how, actually, “God buried those dinosaur bones way back when so that we today would have the oil we need.”)

If memory serves, only Ron Paul raised his hand when a debate moderator asked “Who believes in evolution?” (As a physician, we must assume Dr. Paul took one or more classes in biology, anatomy, maybe natural sciences and such.) Of course that was for a presidential election, with higher stakes than those in a smaller, local election where pretending to be stupid doesn’t play quite as well as it seems to on the national stage.

Climate change will be the conspiracy of 99.99 percent of all the experts whose goal is to…? What is that darn goal by the way? Who stands to gain anything from that? OK, a few solar power companies and their ilk in the renewable resources industry. Hard to imagine that “green business” has enough money to buy all those climate experts, but who knows?

Once again, that evil, wicked, soul-sucking, money-wasting “big government” will be trying to get into our lives by suggesting that everyone shouldn’t be able to buy guns down on the corner. That criminals and imbeciles can do it too is just the cost of being free. Now when that same “soul-sucking” big government gets deep into our bedrooms and tells us what we can or can’t do and what we can or can’t do after doing what we do, those candidates will crow and huzzah till the cows come home. And if justice is served, some of those who huzzah the loudest about family values and the sanctity of marriage will eventually be unmasked as non-practitioners of those self-same values and sanctitudes. And all will be “pro-life” especially when it concerns the death penalty. Some pro-lifers also tend to favor killing a lot of people in countries that annoy us, particularly if the people there subscribe to a false religion and/or have something under their sand that we might want.

Public education will be spanked because it: A) Doesn’t allow prayer in schools; B) Teaches evolution but not creationism; C) Is under the thumb of nefarious teacher unions who only look out for themselves and don’t care about the kids; D) All of the above.

Saying anything negative about income inequality or lack of hedge fund oversight or the causes of dirty air and water will of course be verboten. “Stop overtaxing the rich; put lead back where it belongs, in paint; quit making kids wear bike helmets, say ‘Merry Christmas’ — and most of all repeal Obamacare,” will be heard plenty.

Now a crook is a crook is a crook. A crook steals and bribes and corrupts and does stuff like that. With any luck, he or she gets caught and goes to jail. But a crook who is also a hypocrite — now there’s a villain in my book. Rush Limbaugh was one of them back when he was lambasting “drug users,” all the while illegally obtaining and using drugs. That’s lightweight, though, compared to Leland Yee, California State Senator indicted for a number of things like corruption and racketeering. That a lot of those things involved smuggling, dealing and profiting from an illegal arms business puts him way beyond the pale. He’s one of the top “gun control” people and he’s being charged as a major player in a gun-running enterprise? Unbelievable. And how about those jolly Calderon boys from the same Democratic dominated legislature? I don’t know if they’re as high on the hypocrite scale as Yee, but I wouldn’t doubt it.

Unfortunately, no party or persuasion has a corner on the hypocrisy market.

Chris Daley is a staff writer and columnist for the Mountain Democrat. His column appears each Friday.